Is it premature to call an album “one of the greatest worship records of all time” after 10 years?
When Becoming Who We Are came out, a lot of reviewers were not asking this question. They were not even asking whether 10 weeks was enough time. At that moment (October 28, 2014), an abnormally large proportion of contemporary Christian music listeners were calling it “the greatest worship album of the 21st century.” Such words are not uttered often due to a perpetually low representation of music journalism for the artists that are enjoyed almost exclusively by Christians. Most artists in this weird subsection of “off-radio contemporary Christian music” are doing well if they get a single good review on any platform more respectable than “some dude’s blog”. Yet here was King’s Kaleidoscope, a brand new band with no discography (aside from a few hymn rearrangements and a live EP), releasing an hour-long album to rapturous praise from several media outlets. Don’t just take my word for it though; here’s what they had to say:
Guitars, horns, woodwinds, vibraphones, strings, pretty much anything they can get their hands on fill every crevice of this outstanding release - Jeremy Armstrong, Worship Leader magazine
…stirring emotional vocals, hook-filled music and deep, prayerful lyrics throughout…this is a great album of new songs filled with a sincere desire to “seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. - Kevin Davis, New Release Today
I believe that Kings Kaleidoscope is that band that we have been waiting for to lead the creative worship genre. - Ian Zandi, Indie Vision Music
Clearly an album that pushes the boundaries of worship music, Becoming Who We Are aims to move beyond the comfort zone of the inspirational genre by adding layers and unique compositions to bring out a truly original sound and uncompromising message. - Sarah Dos Santos, HM magazine
To point out all the highlights of this album would make for an extremely long read, because the entirety of the album is a highlight. - Scott Fryberger, Jesus Freak Hideout
Who are Kings Kaleidoscope? How does this record exist? Why did a band met with such adulation fail to reshape the Contemporary Christian Music industry in the way that their admirers predicted they would? All of these are great questions. Allow me to go back in time to try and answer them.
First, the band. Kings Kaleidoscope are not as much of a band as they are a collective anchored around one Chadwick “Chad” Gardner. When he was 19, Gardner got heavily involved with the now-infamous Mars Hill Church of Seattle, graduating to the significant position of one of the music leaders. On the strength of a memorable Good Friday music set, some of the church elders thought that Gardner and co. had what it took to start writing and recording their own music. This wasn’t unprecedented for Mars Hill, especially considering that the worship director, Dustin Kensrue, was also the frontman of the influential indie-rock band Thrice. Along with his church band The Modern Post, others such as Citizens & Saints (now just known as “Citizens”), The Sing Team, Red Letter, and Ghost Ship were all working on original music for Mars Hill. In fact, like many of the most successful megachurches in recent history (Hillsong, Bethel, Elevation, etc.), the music was a crucial factor in the rapid church growth. Unlike those other churches though, Seattle was not a city where sentimental, intimate, tugging-on-heartstrings worship music would be well received. This was Seattle, the home of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Foo Fighters, and many other bands that appealed to huge swaths of people that harbored any real or disingenuous feelings of disenfranchisement. Naturally, this context heavily informed the musical tastes of the church musicians too, resulting in a grittier, sharper-edged sound than the church music coming from anywhere else in America. This included a young Chad Gardner, a rising star in the church who was effectively shunned from the community after he saw the toxicity of the community for what it was and tried to leave gracefully.
As the excellent Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast has gone to great lengths to illustrate, getting ostracized from the Mars Hill community was devastating. It was such a self-sustaining, all-consuming community (until it imploded, that is) that anyone removed from it lost contact with most of their friends, the one church that invigorated their faith, and perhaps their job. It was a little like being excommunicated. Gardner seemed to get off better than most in that he was still able to maintain relationships with his bandmates, but even still, he found himself out of a job way earlier than expected.
In his mind, the only logical path forward was to see out the one aspect of his job at Mars Hill that he had any control over: the music he had written. Even in the midst of the whirlwind of emotions and stressors, he felt a sense of compulsion to “do the music justice.” He didn’t necessarily have plans of making King’s Kaleidoscope a long-term endeavor, but he wanted to finish what they had started. The rest of the band agreed, so all 10 members assembled in a middle school gym to record a live EP of four original songs and two rearrangements. The final product, titled Live in Color, generated a surprising amount of buzz and gave the band something tangible to justify their place on a prospective record label. They were eventually added to the roster of Tooth & Nail records, a unique label that has proved to be something of a safe haven for all sorts of Christian musicians who want to do things differently to the established Christian radio hit-making machine.
Described in this interview from Jesus Freak Hideout, the actual recording process could be characterized in the same way I would describe the sound of the album: organized chaos. With 10 band members of very different musical backgrounds, Chad worked tirelessly to foster an environment of creativity and expression during the songwriting sessions. They had to find a way to integrate the competing musical impulses of grunge, punk, church worship music, Meshuggah (apparently the main drummer was a huge fan) and Gardner’s own affinities for hip-hop and dubstep. They also had extremely high standards for the sound and production of the instrumentation, so the drums, stringed instruments, bass, and horns were all recorded in different locations to give the album more texture.
In a nutshell, the recording process was alchemy, which is fitting since the end result is magic. To me, the most striking thing about Becoming Who We Are is how unabashedly worshipful it is. In spite of the numerous setbacks, severe lack of budget, and oppressive Mars Hill ecosystem, the “hallelujahs” are emphatic enough to drown everything else out. This is some of the most fearless, ferocious, and sincere worship music I’ve ever had the privilege of hearing. For example, take a look at the chorus of “I Know”, the first song that really cued me in to the brilliance of this band:
I know I will run through Heaven's brilliant streets of gold
Shouting "Hallelujah, Christ alone!"
I know I will dance and sing and bow before the throne
This I know
Stirring, right? Now factor in an awesome boom-clap beat, a wall of brass instrumentation, and catchy acoustic guitar subtleties to make this an all-time classic of a worship song. This is only scratching the surface of this album’s strengths, though. Do you like exuberant, triumphant praise songs? Album closer “Defender” has you covered. A big fan of the Psalms of David? “139” is a reverent, moving, and beautiful song version of the passage with the titular number. Partial to classic hymns? There’s a creative rearrangement of “All Creatures of Our God and King” with a celebratory atmosphere befitting the strong creation narrative. What about percussion and experimental beats? Considering the fact that “Dreams” was written primarily as a challenge to utilize a bizarre preset in Gardner’s drum machine, I’d say this is about as eccentric of a beat as anything you’ve heard this side of freeform jazz. It’s also got a really cool video.
Then there’s the real cream of the crop. “Felix Culpa” is without a doubt one of the most ambitious songs ever written with a church context in mind. Kicking off with a world-conquering guitar lick, Gardner and co. pack nuanced theological discussions on sin, the crucifixion, grace, and redemption into four minutes and 47 seconds of musical mayhem. I admit that the fiery intensity of the vocals and instrumentation make it a bad place to start for new listeners, but the innovation and songwriting prowess are undeniable. On the opposite end of the spectrum, “Zion” is a pensive, heartbreaking reflection on a stillbirth that Gardner and his wife experienced while at Mars Hill. I’m just going to include the lyrics to the whole song…they say so much more than I ever could:
Maybe someday we’ll meet under the stars
Healed and home free, complete, that’s where we’ll start
Zion, I’m coming soon, to where you are
‘Til then my love’s with you, though worlds apart
This will take much longer than I’ve planned
But I will wait to see you, and hold your hands
Waiting each day, God will comfort my soul
You are home now, healthy, safe in His fold
Beyond this storm’s a brilliant sky of stars
I’ll follow you, I'll follow you
Finally, there’s my personal favorite: “Fix My Eyes”. To me, this song is the best distillation of everything great about Becoming Who We Are, from the ominous opening horn blasts to the chilly synth loop in the verses to the gargantuan eruption of instrumentation on every chorus. There is a real dark and intimidating presence in the music, providing a perfect foil to lyrics proclaiming the steadfastness and power of God. There is precedent for Hebrews 12:2 providing inspiration for truly empowering music before, and Kings Kaleidoscope give it everything they have. When the bridge begins, all the instruments cut out except for the strings section and Gardner yells to the heavens “You make me breathe, You're the only life I need! You died for me, You’re the only life I need!” I still get chills when it hits.
To me, the most baffling thing about Becoming Who We Are is how it holds together so well despite being something of a Frankenstein’s monster. Many of the songs were not written by Gardner (such as “139”), several were initially intended for a Mars Hill Sunday service setting, and there wasn’t a guiding theme that anyone had in mind during songwriting and recording. In fact, Gardner had aspirations of being the “anti-worship music band”, deliberately writing praise songs in a way that defied all contemporary worship music conventions. In a post from the band’s official Substack, Gardner admitted that a major goal of writing “Defender” was to produce an upbeat, energetic worship song so fast and rhythmically complex that it was impossible to clap along to. It sounds like he had a clearer idea of what he didn’t want the band to be than what he did (at the time, anyway). And yet, 10 years later, this is still a remarkably solid set of tunes that sounds nothing like the rest of their discography, let alone anyone else’s music. For such a discordant recording context, Becoming Who We Are manages to sound like a record made by a band in complete confidence of the merit of their art and firmly rooted in the profound truths of the Gospel. Time has proved that any confidence they had at all was absolutely justified.
Finally, the million-dollar question: why did the contemporary Christian music industry completely overlook them? As easy as it would be to write it all off as “they were too ahead of their time”, the truth is a little thornier. For a little while, it seemed like they might actually break into the radio market. They won over a respectable audience in Seattle, played a few different music festivals, and got nominated for a Dove Award. Yes, that’s right, a DOVE AWARD, the most obvious stamp of approval that the contemporary Christian music industrial complex in Nashville can give. However, that acclaim was anathema to Gardner, and he ensured that the follow-up album sounded nothing like their debut. That wasn’t the main obstacle to a stable future in music though, since I’m pretty sure songs like “Most of It”, “In This Ocean pt. I”, and “Lost?” could have become at least minor hits if the radio stations pushed them. Where things really went south was the release of a little ditty on Beyond Control titled “A Prayer”. The way Gardner tells it, he was still holding onto a lot of unresolved trauma and bitterness, and the lyrics just spilled out of him one day. He and the band then spent several days pondering whether to even record it, and they were so divided that some stepped away from King’s Kaleidoscope since they weren’t comfortable with playing it live. To put it mildly, the song deals with a lot of big and heavy emotions, so a couple of the lyrics are…big no-nos in most Christian circles. When it was released, “A Prayer” caused a huge stir and they were kicked off of a few music festival lineups that they had already been booked to play at. I’m not going to say that people didn’t have a right to shocked and a little angry, but I also think that it would not have been nearly as big of a deal if a) more people took the time to examine the band’s intentions and b) the contemporary Christian music industry wasn’t so utterly starved for controversy that people take whatever scraps they can get (case in point: all the hand-wringing over David Crowder Band changing a single word in their cover of John Mark McMillan’s “How He Loves” is still enough of a distraction from the music that David Crowder doesn’t sing that single word when he plays it in concert).
King’s Kaleidoscope, meanwhile, rolled with the punches and continued to make music. They’ve released four albums since Beyond Control, and they seem to be more popular than ever, thanks in part to their absolute masterpiece “Sticks & Stones” being used as the theme music for the aforementioned (and enormously successful) podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill (“Sticks & Stones” was later removed from the podcast intros at the request of Gardner, but that’s a story for another time). To this day, they haven’t released anything else that sounds like Becoming Who We Are. Gardner doesn’t seem to hold it in as high regard as the rest of his catalog, saying that he feels like it wasn’t really his album, and he appreciates the influence it had on a new generation of artists more than he appreciates the music itself. I can’t exactly judge how influential it was because that’s hard to do with most albums, so I just have to take his word for it. He and the rest of the band haven’t completely written the music off though. They still play “Defender”, “Grace Alone”, and “Felix Culpa” regularly, and a 10th anniversary show is scheduled in Seattle. Nevertheless, I imagine they will be more keen to revisit their other albums when the 10-year mark hits, and even if Gardner’s cynicism of “worship music” has softened a lot, most of his best work has come from a more personal place than church music can typically accommodate.
As much as I agree with Kings Kaleidoscope that their best music came after 2014, I can’t deny the power of this record. It’s a true testament to the resilience and strength that can be found in Christ. When they had no choice but to let go of everything they held onto most dearly, 10 Seattle-based individuals responded by lifting their hands in praise for all the world to see, and 10 years later that praise carries more power than ever before.